


Are You Ready

by Neaislove



Series: Divination [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Tarot Cards, mentions of drug use, no relationships - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 01:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18377894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neaislove/pseuds/Neaislove
Summary: Four and Six brothers in life and in death. It's just the cards they've been dealt.





	Are You Ready

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to try a more experimental writing style and where better to give it a go than TUA?

Across from each other, both in black, legs crossed and bodies loose, Four and Six sit. Between them is a fan of cards. Seventy-eight in total. Major Arcana and Minor Arcana mixed, face down. The cards are small, squat like a poker deck, with a red border bright as any firetruck. Four had stolen them from a store. Tucked them in his pocket while Two and Three looked for small toys they too could hide in their pockets. Things they could hide from Dad.

Four could see ghosts. Six could bring forth creatures from other worlds. They were liminal spaces, both of them. Four reasoned that this would allow them to read the cards for real. Not like those sly women on street corners or buskers on television. Six wasn't so sure, but for Four he was willing to try. It wasn't training. It wasn't painful. It was a rather quiet activity really. A moment for the two of them to share. Another way to bond as the otherworldly members of the Umbrella Academy.

Four had insisted they wear scarves over their heads and in his excitement Six couldn't turn him down. So while Four had snatched up one of Three's colorful silk scarves Six draped his own woolen black scarf over his head. They're in Four's room because no one investigates noise coming from there anymore. And because Six's room still carries the faintest scent of blood. It's unsettling and he doesn't want to go back until Mom can clean it again.

"The future awaits Number Six! Are. You. Ready for it?" Four leans eagerly over the spread between them, eyeing Six with a manic kind of glee. His mouth is stretched wide in a blinding smile and a wild curl of hair has escaped from under Three's soft pink scarf. Six feels a warmth settle in the base of his stomach, so different from the cold squirming he usually feels there.

"I'm ready."

Neither of them know what they're doing. The deck came with a single folded instruction sheet with a scant description of each card in the Major Arcana. There was little else. Four and Six had seen the woman down the street tell fortunes at times. Only when coming home from missions and only when Father asked them to run the last few blocks home under the guise of conditioning. Four and Six tended to lag behind the others, not wanting, or needing, the validation of their father. The outside world was more interesting. And the fortune teller on the street corner was quite a sight.

Her spread was usually of four cards only with the rest of the deck split in threes in front of her. But Four had insisted on fanning them out. 'What better way to beat the learn it all' he'd suggested. Since they didn't know any better, and they had no way to learn, that was the way it always was. The two of them, across from one another, the fan of cards between them. They'd skim their fingers back and forth across the cards with their eyes closed until they settled together on a single piece. They would pull that card, flip it to its face, then do it all again. Sometimes they pulled four cards like the fortune teller on the corner. Other times seven.

When the cards were drawn the two of them would pass the flimsy instruction paper back and forth to spin wild tales about what their reading could mean. Four liked extravagant stories, wild tales of heroism and escapism. Absurd and whirlwind, always with a happy spin regardless of what the cards meant really. Anything that would put a smile on Six's face.

Six, by contrast, tried to interpret the cards more pragmatically. He didn't see merit in them. Not really, in the sense of divination. But he cherished the way it brought them together. His interpretations reflected that. Their lives would be hard, full of suffering, but they would be better for it. They would leave some day. They would save the world and their father would have to let them go. They would find their other siblings some day. They would go to Griddy's and all the doughnuts would be half off because Agnes was a kind soul. Those were the kinds of things Six saw in the cards.

As the years wore on the cards became battered and bruised. The edges frayed and the colors dulled. After Six, after Ben, died Klaus had laid the cards out one last time. He fanned them face down and put Ben's black woolen scarf over his hair. He ran his fingers across their soft edges. Back and forth, back and forth, again and again. But there was no answering rustle of fingers on the other edge. There was no stifled laughter. No Ben.

That tarot deck met its end to Klaus' rage. His late teens were heady with harsh drugs that sent him spiraling. Needles and heroin and hash. It made him volatile, aggressive. It made him much more a monster than Ben could ever have been. And in one of his fits he ripped the cards to shreds and set them on fire. He did it all while Ben watched and as he came down from his high he felt like he deserved the despair that settled in. They'd never taken the cards seriously. No matter how many times they pulled death they laughed. Klaus had tried to find some meaning in it. Tried and failed.

Heroin was easier than to take than reality. Ben swam from his vision in the haze, always on his peripheral, always faintly smelling of blood and a cold dark otherness Klaus couldn't name.

It was tarot cards that pulled him away from that particular vice. Klaus, once free of his father's regimented schedules, wandered as he pleased. He kept his own hours. Ones that made sense to no one, least of all his tired body. On one of his nightly strolls, half high and looking for another hit, he saw the woman from his childhood. Older, far older than expected her to look given the short years that had passed. She wore more shawls than ever, more coins as well. But Klaus had known her. Had seen the wisps of blue that curled through her stomach and around her feet. The children she didn't have that use to hide under her table when Four and Six came stampeding too close.

They talked. Klaus doesn't remember most of what he said but it ended with her slipping him a soft leather pouch. Inside was a deck of proper tarot cards. Her own. The ones he remembered seeing with Ben all those years ago. They were proper cards. Long and sturdy. The edges of these were soft as well, worn down from use. But the lining was gold leaf and the art of each card looked special. Hand done.

He'd run that night to an abandoned house. The same one he went to when he wanted to shoot up. The same one he tried heroin in the first time. The same place where he watched with a smile as Ben looked on in horror. Horror. How funny that had been to him at the time.

That night he spread the tarot cards before him in a fan. Face down. Seventy-eight in total. Coming down from his high the feel of the cards under his fingertips, the feel of their soft warm backs a contrast to the gritty cold floor, soothed him. Before he fell asleep, crashed finally from the end of his dose, he saw Ben sit across from him. Saw his arm reach out and run the length of the wide fan.

The cards were not enough to stop Klaus from doing drugs. But the single moment of nostalgic joy had him going to rehab voluntarily. He got his chip. Got out. Saw some truly horrific things on his walk and bought a baggie of pills as soon as he could. Pills were easy. Pills were varied. So, so many different kinds. He could buy all sorts from any number of people. He could drown out all of the bad ghoulies and ghosties. But not Ben. Pills couldn't push Ben away. They weren't strong enough.

It was their connection. Liminal spaces. Klaus to the world beyond and Ben to worlds unfathomable. They were doorways. Two boys guarding opposite ends of the same hall and they could not drift too far apart. Heroin had pushed Ben to his peripherals but never truly away. Pills gave Ben movement. Freedom. Words.

Time made Ben whole again. Pills made him frustrated. Klaus could understand. He could. He knew how terrible it was to be stuck. To be nothing but a broken loop tethered to this shit world. Klaus knew because he saw it every second of every day the very moment he came down from his high. He just never cared before because those were people. Just random people. Tragedies in their own stories but nothing to him beyond noise. Klaus felt like that. Felt like a walking ghost bound to repeat himself again and again for all eternity. Only the person who watched him was Ben.

It got him to rehab. It got him clean. Then he got overwhelmed and got himself high and it happened again. And again. And again. Round and round. He was trapped in the mortal coil of his own making bound and restless as any lost soul who tormented him. He was Number Four. He was The Seance. He was Klaus Hargreeves and he was tired.

He died. He came back. He got tortured. Time traveled. Loved and lived and felt alive, felt high, felt everything all at once like all of life was trying to squeeze itself into ten months. He felt like dying. Felt empty. Felt hollowed out and scraped raw. Died again. Met The Great Creator. Came back. Fought. Felt Ben again for the first time in two decades.

He felt Ben. Four and Six, touching again. It was fleeting. Soaked in sadness and lost in a wash of other problems but it was there. As warm and as real as the tarot deck he kept with him.

The world ended. There was a moment, a few stretched seconds, where Klaus imagined himself standing in a long hall. Ben across from him, doors behind both of them. Around them the lights dimmed and the noises of the world fell away. He'd felt peace. But peace wouldn't have him and they were in chaos again. Thirteen again. Sad and scared and all alone again.

Until Ben came back to his room. He sat, quiet as anything, and pulled the black and red squat deck from its hiding spot under Klaus' bed. Ben fanned them on the floor, wide brim to him. He pulled his scarf around his head, dropped it over his eyes.

"Klaus Hargreeves, are you ready?"

"I'm ready."

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so what if the reason Klaus could always see Ben was because they're both portals. Like really? Klaus can see Ben even when he's high because they both exist in the same sort of capacity. That was my thought anyways.


End file.
